Asklemmy

Gonna need some examples methinks. But the tendency to overuse ellipses is right tf up there

Younger than 45

Oh OK that actually makes sense.

45 year olds and above are digital immigrants. In short, they had an off-line childhood and an online adulthood. They have different speech and writing patterns to you because they learnt and communicated in a different way to you.

Assuming you're under 45, this won't make sense, because you've never experienced a world which doesn't have this sort of interaction. You're a digital native, digital tech has always been there.

In twenty years time, children born or educated after the advent of chat gpt will have the same problem understanding you. The way you write, post and interact will seem clunky and old fashioned. It's already happening - we're having to adapt the way we interact, in order to be able to 'be understood' by AI.

The wonderful thing about humanity, tho, is that we do adapt and adopt! Consider this - everyone over the age of 50 had to learn something completely new to them in order to be able to communicate with you via email, sms or messaging app. They used to just talk, or write letters. Sharing media was a physical act. Yet here they are using the same texh as you. Awesome.

Has anyone else younger than 45 or so felt similarly frustrated with geriatrics’ messages?

What always makes me laugh about posts like this is the knowledge that soon you too will hit that terrible 45 and become "geriatric". Your text messages and emails (how quaint) will suddenly become incomprehensible and everyone will claim you are giving them a stroke just by existing .

The clock is ticking... faster than you think.

All of my kids messages are super short or emoji filled, my wife, friends and older contacts all text to text me full paragraphs or sentences.

Need some examples

In my experience, younger people who grew up with the internet write their texts and emails as if they are instant messaging, because they grew up with AOL and MSN messenger etc when it comes to text based communication.

Older people who communicated over text before the internet only did this in one way - writing letters.

As a result their style of texting or emailing is often very long form in comparison.

When writing letters you are limited by how much room there is on a piece of paper.

This leads to using some shorthand which used to be fairly common, but has fallen out of public knowledge for younger people.

You could argue that some of the stuff that younger people email or text informally can be just as cryptic because there is entirely different shorthand that millenials and generations Y and Z use.

If you closely examine how you casually communicate with your peers of a similar age, you will notice it can be just as odd as what you experience from communicating with generations on either side of you.

My mother would mistype and just accept whatever word was substituted in the autocorrect. So I’d receive messages like “what’s times area your striving art under Stevens’s on Saturdays”. Then I’d have to ring her, on the off chance she answered (only turned the phone on when expecting a call), so there wasn’t any point texting in the first place.

Never been called geriatrics before. I can retire now! Nice

Punctuation

It's about as annoying as young people abandoning any and all punctuation entirely. The amount of people that will write an entire paragraph and not use a single period is obscene. If you can't bother to organize your thoughts in the most minimal way, I'm going to assume you have nothing of worth to say and just won't read it. And frankly, if what you're saying is so boiler plate you don't need punctuation, then you really don't have anything to add, so probably just shouldn't.

And why do old people randomly capitalize nouns? Every Sentence reads like the just read the Written Word for the first time and wanted to give It a Try For Themselves

What? Who are you communicating with, and what shortcuts are you talking about? I text with my kids and they use more shortcuts and abbreviations than I do.

In work emails, I try to think of the recipient when writing them. Some people are chattier and prefer a nice introduction and thorough explanation, but my boss likes to just see messages like:

Posted on 13-May, thanks.

So if that's what you are talking about maybe you just have a more social communication style.

Though I will say my husband uses the ominous ellipses too often, like...

Assuming you're under 45, this won't make sense, because you've never experienced a world

Nah. 45 is '78/'79. You can easily run up to '85 on the analogue migration

Not exclusive to old people, unfortunately. I've seen many instances of texts from decidedly young people that make me question if the language being used was some derivative of Old English.

But to answer the question specifically, I generally find that old people have a higher tendency to type or use speech-to-text and then not check for accuracy. It makes it generally pretty common for autocorrect to completely mess up meaning of the message. Also older people seem to either spam or avoid punctuation entirely with no in between.

"Couldn't reply to message on Lemmy, was written like it was typed on a keyboard. Literally can't right now. Too many words."

What an asshole.

For example?